Aural Chemotherapy

I’ve been away for a while. Can’t specifically say why, but I can give the following scenarios, so take your pick:

a) Was in the middle of a shootout between rival drug gangs, getting nicked in the ankle by a stray round. Spent the last two weeks in hospital.

b) Sex game gone wrong with Kimba, involving a vice, a snake and a blowtorch. Spent last two weeks in the burns unit.

c) Tripped over a stray slipper left in local chippie. Broke my arm. Oul granny came back to retrieve the slipper. She leant over and laughed in my face when she saw the predicament I was in. Spent last two weeks in the fractures unit.

Ok, I’ll say. It was C. Don’t care though, still gonna tell people it was A or B.

While in hospital I got a visit by Sweeney. Sweeney has a number of hang-ups, which include, but are not limited to, germs in and around hospitals. He has a psychological 500 metre safety zone around ones that he’s approaching. On his way up the Lisburn Road he’ll don a dust mask and keep it on till he’s at least 500 metres clear of the building again when he’s left. He came in like this, with his dust mask on, wearing a pair of latex gloves. He’s generally freakapolooza when it comes to germs. Once I watched him in the reflection of my hall mirror taking a piss in my toilet. He got a bit of piss on the seat and instead of tearing off a couple of squares of bog roll he took the whole thing and dabbed it with that – then! put it back on the windowsill. And to my shame I never said anything, so perturbed was I.

Sweeney has a plan to start a band. The members he’s suggesting (Aloysius, Bogdan, Me and Kimba) cannot even play a tambourine between us. Sweeney says he’s aware of this, but that this band would be all about the ideas and the sound. Sound not music, he said. He asked for name suggestions. Aural Chemotherapy I suggested less than enthusiastically. Then, with more helpfulness, I said to him that if he were interested in a band that just was about ideas and sound we should start a clown troupe instead. He was not impressed.

Sweeney wanted to start a band before when we were in school. He wanted it to be a three piece, me, him and Joe Kelly. He was inspired by Nirvana and thought he were Kurt Cobain reincarnated. I’d to tell him then that this would have been an impossibility, whatever crackpot new age bullshit he were reading up on, as Cobain blew his ice-cream-for-brains all over the place 14 years AFTER he was born. Our band’s name back then was Infanticide. It were my idea that we print up T-shirts with the face of Dunblane massacre’er Thomas Hamilton on the front (on a side note, Dunblane had many weird facts attached to it, such as Hamilton being close to George Robertson (one of Blair’s poodles during the Kosovo war) and the files on Dunblane have been sealed for 500 yrs or something – plus Hamilton was a high up Mason who knew loads of political figures). The (later to be found out as) paedophile Mr Sadie pulled me up on the band T-shirt and give me a good spanking with his slipper. Which led me onto another brief peninsula of memory, which was how one day in his French class I had my headphones in with the pin that goes into the walkman in my mouth. I was bopping away.

“What’re you at, Pongo, you fucking halfwit?”

I took the pin out of my mouth and said “dancing to the voices in my head sir.”

“Don’t try and affect schizoid airs with me, you haven’t the talent for it.” How right he turned out to be.